REINFORCEMENTS
And though idle as scholars we stand,
Where they pilfer and swarm in our home,
The honey of power waits the hand
But daring to pilfer the comb.
John Hartley, "The Siren City."
A cynic, is he? Then take all he says with an ounce of civet and a grain of salt.—"The Silver Poppy."
To Cordelia over her coffee-cup Mrs. Spaulding confided a remarkable example of her husband's perversity.
Their talk had drifted round to this point because of a scene, of which Cordelia had been an unfortunate witness, the night before. A flurry of unexpected bills had come in at the first of the month. After looking them over, the alert and ever-keen business instinct of Alfred Spaulding had at first gently and then quite vigorously rebelled against what seemed to him nothing but wanton extravagance. A florist's bill in particular—it was for eight hundred dollars—had startled him into indignation, though Mrs. Spaulding remained heroically silent as to the fact that the great bulk of that bill had been due to the unconsidered visits of Cordelia, and had been quite as much a surprise to her as it now was to her husband.
It was not often that his equable temper showed the effect of the storm and stress through which his tired nerves went day by day. Nor was it often that to his wife he spoke in anything stronger than an accent of mild protest. But on rare occasions his patience became exhausted, and at such times she was given to understand—with a display of great anger, always ultimately atoned for by the arrival of significant little boxes from the Spauldings' jeweler—that her husband was not altogether the pliant and passive man which more than one of her friends, and even she herself at times, had been led to believe him.
Mrs. Spaulding sighed heavily.
"And Alfred makes his money so easily!" she said.
"Why does he work so hard, anyway?" asked Cordelia.
"Oh, he says he's got the working habit, and can't shake it off. He gets lonely and restless when he's not busy. He always says it's too late for him to try to change now. But I can't see why he is always fussing about things this way," she went on fretfully, pushing back the little cluster of tradesmen's bills with a dimpled but disdainfully indignant hand, on which glittered not a few heavily jeweled rings. "He understands the market, and all he has to do is invest, and then just watch things, and—er—all that; and then take his money out again. That oughtn't to be such hard work, ought it?"
"And doesn't he ever lose?" Cordelia asked.
"Of course, my dear, sometimes. But Mrs. Herrington—her husband is in Wall Street, too—told me they never have to lose unless they like; unless they want to lead the others on, and that sort of thing, you see. But I never bother about business. Alfred doesn't seem to like it."
"It must take years to understand it all," Cordelia ventured, toying absent-mindedly with the sugar-tongs.
"I think some men are born businesslike, my dear, the same as they're born bow-legged, or with big feet."
She wondered why Cordelia smiled, and then went on: "Why, only a little over a month ago Alfred's brother Louis, you know, sent him three thousand dollars from Milwaukee, to invest. Alfred was going to send it back, but I just made him do it. He put it in some kind of steel. Then he worried so much about it that he took it all out again in less than a week. Even then he made over eight hundred dollars for poor Louis. Just think what it might have been if he'd only left it in right along."
It was this innocent and quite accidental piece of information which gave a new turn to the tide of Cordelia's thoughts.
In her own little yellow-covered bank-book she had a balance of some nineteen hundred dollars. Why should not this, she asked herself, be sent to that mysterious land of magic, Wall Street, and in time come back to her doubled, perhaps trebled? For many months of late she had indefinitely felt the need of more substantial resource than that already at her command.
Why, indeed, could not Mr. Spaulding do for her what he had already done for his brother out in Milwaukee?
She said nothing of her plans, but little by little resumed her regular morning drives with Mr. Alfred Spaulding down to his office, a matter in which she had been more or less remiss of late. Alfred Spaulding, in fact, objected to taking his carriages into Wall Street at all, and had forsworn the elevated railway only because his more practical wife—more practical in this thing, at any rate—insisted that he should get at least half an hour's open air each day.
Cordelia greatly surprised that absent-minded gentleman one morning by timidly putting a little cut-glass vase on his desk, into which she slipped an American Beauty rose. Although she had talked to him a great deal, and about many things, it was nearly a week before she approached the matter that lay nearest her heart.
"Women sometimes—er—put their money into stocks, don't they?" Cordelia asked tentatively, as they bowled briskly down Fifth Avenue one bright morning.
"Yes, and nearly always lose it, too," was Mr. Spaulding's discouraging and somewhat curt reply.
"But if they are certain about the right thing?"
"They never are. No one is."
"But if they have a friend in Wall Street, a friend who knows—" ventured Cordelia.
"Then the friend never knows. My advice is for women to keep out of Wall Street."
"But aren't there any stocks that are safe? I mean, aren't there any good ones you feel certain about, for instance?"
"Of course; but those are the kind you never make your money out of—at least not at the rate women want to make it. They're slow and steady."
"But you've been in Wall Street so long! Surely there's something you feel to be safe and yet going to go up, too?"
The ghost of a smile crept over his worn face.
"Miss Vaughan, if I had that delightful power, I'd make a million before I came home for dinner to-night."
"But didn't you make nearly a thousand dollars for your brother Louis?" she asked, after a pause.
"Yes, I did; and it caused me more bother and worry than making eighty times that much out of my own money. Louis is a pretty poor man, you know."
"Yes?" said Cordelia.
"It meant a good deal to him. If I hadn't carried him over on my own shoulders he'd have been hard hit."
"I don't think I should mind the risk."
"One never does, till one tries it."
"I want to try." Then after a moment's pause she said: "Mr. Spaulding."
"Well?"
"Mr. Spaulding, I've two thousand dollars," she had not quite that sum, but she knew that she could easily make it up by means of a loan from his wife—"and I intend to speculate with it. Won't you invest it for me?"
"Miss Vaughan, I've made it a rule, an inexorable rule, never to take a woman's money in the Street."
"Please!"
"You know lessons there usually cost about a thousand dollars a second."
"I'd be sorry to go to some one I didn't know," she pouted girlishly, and then she added, "or didn't trust."
"Yes, I think probably you would, afterward."
"But I shall," she said determinedly. As to this the man of business made no reply.
The next morning she slipped a bunch of English violets into his little cut-glass vase.
"Won't you?" she pleaded again in her softest voice.
He looked at the flowers, at his waiting mail, and then at the girl—or was she not a woman?—herself.
"Yes, yes," he said wearily. She took his hand and fondled it as a child might. With all his business he was a somewhat lonely man.
"We'll see what we can do with it," he added more cheerily, in a little glow of latent gallantry that left him feeling uncomfortable and hot. Then he touched an electric button and his private secretary appeared with a bundle of notes and documents in his hand, and Cordelia slipped away triumphant.
It was her one and only financial plunge. Although Alfred Spaulding never confessed to her that the precariousness of his venture on her behalf cost him two long nights of sleeplessness, it was more successful than he or even she herself had hoped for. Out of it she made twenty-two hundred dollars.
The man of Wall Street, not unnaturally, silently braced himself for another scene with her, determined that this time she should not prevail. Perhaps she saw this, or perhaps she realized that for once sheer luck had gone with her. At any rate, to her host's surprise, and not a little to his inner satisfaction, she placed the money in her own bank and said nothing more of the matter.